By A Mountain Lion
Hello. I’m a mountain lion. You may have heard about me recently. You see, last week I was the first mountain lion in my family to make it into college. Not just any college—the college—my college—Stanford. I’m writing this because over the past several days, several people have asked me how I got past Stanford’s admissions officers.
The good news is that pretty much anyone can attend Stanford. But before you can even think about living here, before you even take one step onto campus, you need to have a good attitude. No matter who you are or where you’re from, there are always going to be people who say you don’t belong, people who feel threatened by you, who want you to go home. I know, because I see these people all the time. No matter how nice I am, I can never get these people to be friendly. In fact, most of the time when people saw me at Stanford, they tried to 1-up me by waving their arms, talking smack, and trying to look bigger than me (I’m a tall fella’. I’d say I’m about 6’4”).
The point is, people will try to shoot you down, so it’s important to have a sense of self-confidence and entitlement. But once you have that, getting into Stanford is as easy as putting one foot in front of the other.
I’d like to close by talking about grades and test scores. Most people say that you need to get a 2000 or higher on the SAT to get Stanford to notice you. But I know from experience that this simply isn’t true. I didn’t even take the SAT and I’ve never even seen a high school. Hell, I didn’t even apply to Stanford. But did that stop me from becoming a member of the Stanford student body? Absolutely not.
So when you’re thinking about what you want to do with your life, about where you want to end up, don’t let “requirements” and “applications” get in your way, just do what feels right. How else could a mountain lion like me end up in the school of his dreams?
